W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #patricktosani, #fingernails

Photographs can poke you in the chest, and say “Wake up!”  I do have a taste for the dark side in photography but I don’t think it has anything to do with a morbid sensibility but rather a mad insistence on, a craving for sensation.  There is the ongoing discussion about how the number of images of violence in newspapers, magazines, television and movies have somehow inured us and desensitized us.

There was a suite of images in a exhibition of works by the French conceptual  and photo-based artist Patrick Tosani brilliantly curated by Sylvia Wolf at The Art Institute of Chicago in 1992.  It is still fresh in my memory.  Tosani loves elements like fire and ice and the banal like the bubbles in carpenter levels and women’s high heels.  He did a series of portraits/still lifes of bloodied fingernails that had been chewed and broken. Viewers would wince and look at away.  Even describing his “Les Ongles (Fingernails)” is still chilling.  It was incredibly violent and powerful.  And funny when you consider how banal it actually is. 

“The psychological anxiety of fingernail biting is not what I am interested in, but rather the constant repression continuous growth, which refers to boundaries and, in turn, to the containment of the photographic frame.  The fingernail is violated bu t large white border and enclosed in a prose rectangle that contrasts an inner image with an unknown outer field” *1

Tosani’s genius offered up silver spoons that each had their own unique history so that each behaved like a unique fingerprint, a forensic portrait as it were, and out of focus portraits of blind people with braille text stamped not the print.. 

The artist has not had much visibility in the US, but is rather a contemporary French star.  

Smart guy.  

*1 Dialogue between the artist and Sylvia Wolf, exhibition catalogue, The Art Insitiute of Chicago, December 1991

©2021